Between 1064AD and 1066AD –
A Pilgrimage to the Original Handy Diagram
The Bayeux Tapestry, embroidered in the year 1066 to chart the Norman conquest of England, is perhaps the very first Handy Diagram in existence, and so a recent visit to France seemed too good an opportunity to miss out on a pilgrimage of sorts to its current resting place in the cleverly titled Museum of the Bayeux Tapestry.
Home to the Bayeux Tapestry:
The Museum of the Bayeux Tapestry, Bayeux.
After a forty-minute drive from the town of St Vaast la Hougue, and a pleasant game of mini-golf and a hot dog* in a nearby town, we arrived in Bayeux. Once there, the tapestry is unsurprisingly easy to locate (as long as you are capable of following signs with arrows and the word ‘Tapestry’ emblazoned across them). Following the signs brings you to the museum photographed above, wherein the friendly staff will relieve you of your Euros and point you along the relevant corridor. Forking off the relevant corridor is a subsidiary corridor, which contains toilet facilities and a water cooler that, it seems to me, could keep a person who really wanted to squeeze maximum value out of their three Euros sustained for weeks.
Having shuttled a few gallons of water the few yards from the dispenser to the cubicles via ones own intestinal tract, you proceed through the museum to the first exhibit, which is a kind of preliminary warm-up tapestry before the main event. Longer and taller than the tapestry itself, it essentially serves to explain to the historically ignorant (i.e. me,) what you will be seeing when you look at the real thing later, but what it is most memorable for is the sign on the door preceding it explaining that what you are about to see is in fact not the real Bayeux Tapestry – presumably this is for the benefit of those among us who were previously unaware that this millennium-old historical artefact was not in fact written in both English and French for the convenience of tourists. After reading through the tapestry précis, you reach The Point Of No Return. While not in fact labeled this in the museum, the signs around this area make it pointedly clear that if you haven’t assimilated all of the information from the pre-tapestry and the dioramas and the cinema feature (on which I am unable to report having strategically bypassed it in a clever timing manoeuvre,) then you won’t get another chance because there is No Return.
Having traversed a few further corridors and staircases, you finally reach the Bayeux Tapestry itself. The museum equips you with a handheld mobile-phone-from-1993-style unit to provide you with a running commentary as you move along the exhibit. (It also doubles as a strategic way of keeping visitors moving along at a decent pace, as if people linger too long their commentary will run ahead of what they are looking at, and they risk having the ending spoiled for them.) If you’re wondering why there haven’t been any pictures in this report for a while, it is because the public is not allowed to take photographs of the tapestry itself – presumably because it is kept in precisely controlled conditions to hopefully help preserve it for another thousand years, and the repeated harsh light of a thousand flashbulbs a week fades and distorts this ancient and invaluable insight into another age, without which human culture would be so massively the poorer. So if you want to see pictures, you’ll have to talk to the person in front of me who was taking them anyway.
Seeing the Bayeux Tapestry is much as you might expect it to be from what you already doubtless know about it, with the wonderful addition of your Star-Trek-tricorder device pressed to your ear explaining the details of the history – the highlight of which being just after the Normans have landed in England, the commentary (no doubt authored in France) offhandedly explains how the invading forces set up camps and secure their horses, “with some pillaging.” Not a lot of pillaging, you understand, but just about the right amount of pillaging. The story itself is related on the tapestry not actually in strict chronological order (or even in real-time, those uninventive slackers). Instead, like a Quentin Tarantino movie, events are displayed in the order that the creators felt would best show the intricacies of the plot. Consequently, King Edward’s funeral takes place before he actually dies. (Yes, sorry, I'm afraid old Edward doesn't survive this particular story. In fact I don't think he makes it past the fifty-yard mark.) Following the Battle of Hastings, and the unfortunate eye/arrow incident, the Tapestry rather abruptly finishes. It seems that at this point it has been damaged somehow, and nobody knows exactly how long the missing fragment is, or what exactly might have been shown on it. I would sincerely like to blame for this the photograph-taking idiot ahead of me, but I understand the end piece has been missing for rather longer than would seem to make this idea plausible.
Rounding off your tapestry experience is the obligatory gift shop selling, as you might expect, various t-shirts, postcards, mugs, and other assorted goods with Bayeux Tapestry extracts printed across them.
The Museum of the Bayeux Tapestry Gift Shop –
Ideal for creating your very own Bayeux Tapestry themed room.
There are other things to do in Bayeux, of course, but they are also pretty generally tapestry-oriented. You can visit the cathedral in which it was originally going to be housed (and where, I can only presume, they wouldn’t have charged you €3 a time for the privilege of looking at it). Otherwise, you can visit some more souvenir shops, and buy some unofficial tapestry merchandise such as Bayeux tapestry cushions and tea-towels (if you think you’re ready for that level of brazen recklessness).
So then, that’s my report of my pilgrimage to the site of the very first Handy Diagram. Having exhausted the tourism possibilities of the town, there was nothing left except for a long drive back to St Vaast – which did have the advantage of conferring on me plenty of time to play my newly-invented game, Consecutive Renault Spotting, of which I’m sure you can infer the rules by yourself (Hint: the game became distinctly less challenging when we drove past a Renault dealership).
* A word of advice: don't order hot dogs in France. The French can't do hot dogs. As any right-minded person knows, there are four vital components to a correctly-made hot dog: the bread, which must be a soft white roll; the sausage, which must be a frankfurter; the onions, which must be, er, onions; and the condiment, which must be ketchup, or (if you are some kind of devil-worshipper), mustard. The hot dog I ate had, respectively, a baguette piece; a strange, freaky, foreign sausage; nothing; and mayonnaise.